A lawsuit filed by a former Fenwick High School student alleging that school leaders had covered up and enabled sexual abuse by a teacher in the mid-1990s was settled out-of-court last fall.
The suit, filed in 2022, alleged that former Fenwick Principal James Quaid had refused to act on allegations of sexual abuse made by several girls against social studies teacher Matthew Dineen during that era, allowing the abuse to continue for months. Allegedly, school leaders did not report any of the allegations to law enforcement or to the girls’ parents and did not add a record of the allegations to Dineen’s personnel file, according to a report by the Chicago Sun-Times published last weekend.
The suit, which named Quaid and Fenwick as defendants, settled out-of-court on Nov. 6, 2024, according to Cook County court records.
“Defendant fell miserably short of its obligations because Matthew Dineen routinely spent inappropriate amounts of time with and sexually abused and sexually assaulted JANE DOE outside of class, and routinely sexually spent inappropriate amounts of time with and abused and sexually assaulted JANE DOE 2 and JANE DOE 3 during the school day and in the school building,” the plaintiff said in a section of the complaint published by the Sun-Times.
The suit also alleged that Dineen had groomed the girls, blackmailed girls into engaging in sexual relationships with him and been allowed to spend time with the girls in inappropriate settings, according to the newspaper.
The suit also alleged that Quaid had intimidated a girl out of making an allegation against Dineen, reportedly telling her “I am going to ask you a question, and if the answer is ‘Yes’ you will be kicked out of school. Are you having an affair with Mr. Dineen?” according to the Sun-Times.
Quaid denied the allegation in a deposition, according to the paper.
Quaid presently serves as superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Joliet.
Dineen would go on to work as a teacher and coach at Gardiner Area High School in Maine, where in 2010 he was convicted of three misdemeanor counts of unlawful sexual touching in a case involving a 16-year-old student. He was sentenced to 120 days in prison, according to the Portland Press Herald.
The girls Dineen allegedly abused were among the first classes of female students to attend Fenwick, which had been an all-boys school until the early 1990s.
Fenwick teachers have been accused of sexual misconduct on several other occasions dating back decades, with allegations implicating both ordained and lay faculty members.
The Dominican Friars of the Central Province, which runs Fenwick, did not list former Fenwick Latin teacher John Gambro on its first published list of clergy who’d been credibly accused of sexual assault in 2022. But the order reversed course years later, admitting that it had become aware of his 1978 sexual assault of a boy at Fenwick in 2002, according to the Sun-Times.
Gambro was never laicized and died in 2021.
In 2019, several men spoke with Wednesday Journal about sexual abuse they’d experienced or heard of from Rev. William P. Farrell, a longtime teacher, counselor and spiritual advisor at Fenwick who died in 1989.
In 2022, Fenwick let go of longtime basketball coach and history teacher John Quinn after allegations of grooming and sexual harassment became public, with the school saying its months-long investigation had “uncovered clear and unequivocal violations” against students.
In a Wednesday Journal column published on the heels of the allegations against Quinn, Jack Crowe wrote that a Fenwick priest named Robert Francis Crowe, the cousin of his father, had sexually abused his older brother.
Robert Francis Crowe is not mentioned among the Central Province’s list of clergy credibly accused of sexual abuse, while the order says its “Sexual Misconduct Review Board did not consider themselves to have a sufficient basis for making a reliable recommendation about allegations against” William Farrell.
Fenwick, Quaid, lawyers for the woman who brought the case, The Diocese of Joliet and The Diocese of Chicago all reportedly declined requests from the Sun-Times for comment.
